About

Dokmai Dogma is a blog associated with Dokmai Garden, a botanical garden in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. Dokmai Garden is a place to learn  about tropical farming and gardening and their organisms: flowers, vegetables, trees, birds, fish, mammals, butterflies and mushrooms. In total we have more than 1000 plant species and varieties in our collection.

In the past we were open to the public, but the garden is now private.

Dokmai Dogma contains ‘How To’ articles about growing tropical plants as well as articles about our garden activities, vegetables, Thai cooking, fruits, trees, pests, ecology, biodiversity and the occasional book review.

The ‘Search’ option (the box to your right) enables you to quickly find what you are looking for among our 880+ articles. Bear in mind that our host WordPress lists Dokmai Dogma blogs with the search word in the title first.

You can also browse this free book on tropical monsoon gardening & farming by clicking ‘Home’, thereby reading the blogs in a chronological order to follow the seasons.

If you want to read about highlights during special months, click ‘Archives’ to your right and select the month and year you are interested in.

Hyperlinks are green. Click on the green text and you will see a related blog or website.

Most Dokmai Dogma articles are written by Eric Danell, a Swedish plant physiologist with a PhD from Uppsala University. He has also worked as an Associate Professor in Forest Microbiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He prefers the title ‘gardener’, stressing that he is interested in all topics of natural sciences and art. Since I am Thai and Eric is Swedish, we should also like to apologize in advance for any English text that may seem illogical or pejorative (we recently learnt that ‘oriental’ is a pejorative word in the USA but not in the UK).

Our Tropical Garden School has attracted students from all over the world, including Australia, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, England, Finland, France, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. At present this option is closed.

A burning issue is the Thai biodiversity decline, including the wild orchids which disappear quickly. To contribute to the struggle in saving these spectacular species, we launched the Orchid Ark in April 2011.

As with our garden, we hope that this blog will serve as an educational resource.  We welcome all comments, suggestions, and questions.  If you are a scientist with a special field of expertise concerning Thai biology, we should be most honoured if you would like to share your scientific publications (pdf) with us. They will benefit our educational quest.

Ketsanee Seehamongkol, owner.

Ketsanee Seehamongkol with flowers of climbing ylang-ylang (Artabotrys siamensis) in the hair. Ketsanee grew up at a farm in Roi-Et in Esan. She has a BA in ‘Hotel Business and Tourism Industry’ from Udon Thani Rachapat Institute University.